Gladstone Taylor, Gleaner Online Writer

With high-speed Internet prices constantly falling, faster speed being delivered and more subscribers coming on board, surfers are finding new uses for their web connections.

Among the many high-speed leisure activities, the most popular seems to be video streaming.

Thousands of people point their browsers to various video-streaming websites daily, and feast to their eyes' content.

This week we will look at the more prominent video-streaming sites.

www.youtube.com: This is without a doubt the most popular of online video-streaming websites. It would be difficult to hazard a guess as to how many videos are hosted on YouTube, but it can be assumed that the number runs into the millions.

The site operates with a community/social structure where users can upload videos, and viewers may comment and vote.

Though YouTube does not condone the uploading and/or hosting of videos with pornographic, violent and/or nude content, there have been cases where such videos have made their way on to the website.

YouTube is a great tool for people in the web-services arena who wish to offer videos on their websites for viewing.

It is also a great method for garnering feedback from a worldwide audience via comments.

YouTube allows viewing of videos by guests, so you don't have to go through the hassle of signing up just to watch a single video.

But signing up gives you the added bonus of uploading videos and posting comments.

www.DailyMotion.com: This website operates along the same lines as YouTube's social-networking structure, but goes a step further with better-quality videos.

The video quality is visibly better and the video dimensions are also larger and easier on the eyes. Daily Motion has also invested a lot of time in its visual appeal.

www.Metacafe.com: Another video-streaming website which operates under the same principle as YouTube and Daily Motion, but Metacafe leans more towards daily motion in terms of how it operates.

It offers a large video player, great video playback quality and a clean user interface.

Note: The quality of the videos are mainly dependent on the recording-device capabilities on each of the sites featured.

However, based on the dimensions that each site re-encodes, the output quality of the same video would vary from site to site, with Daily Motion providing the best quality due to its high video resolution.

gladstone.taylor@gleanerjm.com